In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and then tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. Here are mental droppings from a newly retired radio engineer running from tech news to economics; from firearms to the world at large; from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of stuff.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

In my History of the World, a strong candidate for the title of "Greatest Achievement of Mankind" is the two Grand Tour satellites of Voyager 1 and 2. As we're coming up on the 40th anniversary of the launch of the two probes, there has been some celebration, some retrospection, a PBS Special "The Farthest" on August 23rd and some recognition of the handful of people who have supported the program over the years. Remarkably, some of those people have spent the entire 40 years supporting the missions.

The mission almost didn't happen. In the late 1960s, a doctoral student named Gary Flandro was working at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. He was given the assignment to consider missions beyond the planned Mars missions. Plotting the positions of the planets of all of the outer planets for the coming 20 years, (with pencil and paper) he realized that a trajectory was possible where a probe could use each planet in series as a gravitational slingshot to the next, and complete a tour of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in 10 or 12 years rather than the three decades such a venture would require
otherwise. The mission launch window would open for a matter of months
in the late 1970s, and then the geometry would be gone - not appearing for another 175 years.

It was an ambitious idea at a time when the apex of interplanetary
exploration was Mariner 4 shooting 21 grainy photos as it flew past
Mars. No probe had ever functioned for anything close to a decade in
space. None had the intelligence to manage complex planetary encounters
at vast distances without constant human hand-holding. Playing
crack-the-whip past multiple planets might work in theory but had never
been attempted in practice. "I was told, 'This is impossible; stop
wasting my time,'" Flandro recalled.

NASA swallowed hard and proposed a grand tour mission anyway, but Congress rejected it, instead approving a cheaper, stripped-down version that would venture out no farther than Saturn.

The JPL spacefarers responded in the tradition of the hardiest explorers of earlier epochs. They cheerfully agreed to the plan, assured one another that Congress didn't really understand the situation, and quietly went to work designing and building two tough, smart spacecraft capable of going all the way to Neptune.

The Voyagers reached Jupiter in March of 1979, capturing images of lightning in its cloud tops and astounding scientists
— who had assumed all moons were as barren as our own — with pictures
of eight active volcanoes on its satellite Io. Europa, another Jovian
moon, was encased in a shell of water ice, cracked in places by what
appeared to be the tides of an ocean below. The photographs revealed
themselves on control-room monitors pixel by pixel, row by row. Similarly, Voyager 1 arrived at Saturn in November of 1980 with Voyager 2 arriving nine months later in August of 1981. The program would have been over after the second Saturn encounter, but by that time President Reagan had granted them an extension for the Grand Tour that had been planned all along.

The final flyby, of Neptune’s moon Triton, took place on a hot August
night. Afterward, everyone celebrated with Champagne, cold cuts and
drunken singing; on the JPL lawn, Chuck Berry performed ‘‘Johnny B.
Goode,’’ one of the tracks included on gold-plated records of human
sights and sounds attached to the spacecraft for any intelligent life
that might find them. Then, gradually, the hallways grew quiet. [Project Scientist Dr. Ed] Stone
and his colleagues moved on to new projects while analyzing Voyager data
part time; the flight team laid off 150 engineers (many of whom went on
to staff subsequent missions). The probes’ new goal was to reach
interstellar space. But though scientists had measured the speed of the
solar wind that forms the heliosphere, the properties of the matter
beyond it had never been analyzed. How much pressure it exerted on the
bubble, and thus the size of the bubble, were a mystery. So, too, was
how long — years? decades? — it might take a craft to escape it.

Ed Stone, closest to the camera, was the Voyager Project Scientist from 1972 through the end of the Neptune flyby. This was at a press conference for the PBS special. Rahoul Ghose, PBS photo.

The New York Times, of all places, puts together a wholly nice article about the mission and the team, with virtually none of the lefty overtones I expect from the Times; possibly because there's nothing to milk here. It had nothing to do with global warming (in the late 70s the cause was global cooling) or any other liberal cause celebre, and if nothing else, was a government program.

Meet Larry Zottarelli.

In the early spring of 1977, Larry was a 40 year old engineer at the JPL. The Los Angeles native, who had never driven as far as Tijuana, climbed in his Toyota Corolla and set out for Cape Canaveral, 2600 miles away. His mission: to support the launch of Voyager 1. A fleet of trucks and cars carried the spacecraft and the "key contributors" (like Larry) along to the Cape (it's JPL policy not to put everyone in one vehicle, as insurance against the remote possibility of disastrous crash).

It took six months, working in shifts around the clock, for the NASA crew to reassemble and test the two spacecraft. Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, with Voyager 1 launching 16 days later on September 5, 1977. Voyager 1 was given a faster trajectory, so that it had overtaken Voyager 2 within the first two years, arriving at Jupiter four months ahead of its sibling.

Voyager 1.

For the foreseeable future, Voyager seems destined to remain in the
running for the title of Mankind’s Greatest Journey, which might just
make its nine flight-team engineers — most of whom have been with the
mission since the Reagan administration — our greatest living explorers.
They also may be the last people left on the planet who can operate the
spacecraft’s onboard computers, which have 235,000 times less memory
and 175,000 times less speed than a 16-gigabyte smartphone. And while
it’s true that these pioneers haven’t gone anywhere themselves, they are
arguably every bit as dauntless as more celebrated predecessors.
Magellan never had to steer a vessel from the confines of a dun-colored
rental office, let alone stay at the helm long enough to qualify for a
senior discount at the McDonald’s next door.

The Times introduces us to the crew. Enrique Medina, an attitude and articulation control system engineer, he joined the team in 1986. Roger Ludwig, a telecom engineer has been with the Voyager team since 1989. Tom Weeks, hardware engineer, who joined in 1983. Sun Kang Matsumoto, an engineer who started in 1985. Jefferson Hall, mission flight director, who began working on the Voyager team in 1978, before the Jupiter encounters. Finally, Suzanne Dodd, flight-team project manager; Voyager was her first job.

At the mission’s outset, the flight-team members were mischievous kids.
They relieved stress with games and pranks: bowling in the hallway,
using soda cans as pins; filling desk drawers with plastic bags of live
goldfish; making scientists compete in disco-pose contests. Now, by
1990, they were older, with kids of their own. They had experienced the
deaths of colleagues and watched others’ marriages falter as a result of
long hours at the lab. With no planets to explore, they spent the
decade doing routine spacecraft maintenance with a fraction of their
bygone manpower. Six of the current nine engineers were on the team
then. Sun Kang Matsumoto, who joined the mission in ’85, studied so
diligently to master the new roles pressed upon her that her sons
learned the spacecraft contours by osmosis. When her eldest was 8, he
surprised her with a perfect Lego model; now in college, ‘‘he calls and
asks, ‘How is Voyager?’ Like, ‘How is Grandma?’ ’’ Matsumoto says.

The mission originally occupied three floors of Building 264 on the JPL
campus, home to many of the lab’s highest-profile projects. But soon
after Neptune, says Jefferson Hall, who joined the project in 1978, ‘‘we
were booted out.’’ Their first move was into the former offices of a
mainframe-computer company in Sierra Madre.

Larry Zottarelli retired in 2016, the year he turned 80. He gave six months notice so that he could train a successor. The Times author, Kim Tingley, writes:

I had stopped by his office to say goodbye and ask him what he planned
to do with his newfound freedom. I pictured him in the Doretti, flying
down the Pacific Coast Highway, wind in his hair. But he seemed to be in
no mood for talking. I wished him well and turned to go. Then he spoke.
‘‘I expect my second stroke will be on the 17th of November,’’ he said
ruefully, gesturing toward his empty wall calendar. ‘‘Life expectancy is
five to seven years at my age on retiring, so —’’ He paused. ‘‘That was
humor, I guess. I’m not looking forward to being even older. Got no
choice in the matter.’’

I asked if he ever found himself thinking about the billions of years that the Voyagers will circle the center of the galaxy, long after our sun has exploded, scattering more stardust throughout the universe. ‘‘Of course,’’ he said. ‘‘I was raised in the Roman Rite. I’m pretty much an atheist. But what is the meaning of life? It’s not Monty Python, O.K.?’’

Had he reached any conclusions about what it is? ‘‘Well, on Earth, yeah,’’ he said. ‘‘One species always prepares the way for the next generation — that’s all.’’

The Voyagers keep coasting along, with some sensors on and still sending back new data. The power is so low and the pair so far away that only three antennas on earth are big enough to receive the Voyagers' data. The JPL still has a page dedicated to the latest updates from the pair. Their power, which comes from Radioisotope Thermal Generators (radioactive decay) is dwindling. There is really now way to know that the probes will survive until there's not enough power to transmit, no way to know if they'll make it to the 50 year, "golden anniversary". Considering the vast emptiness of space, they're expected to travel long after they've gone cold. Perhaps coasting for billions of years in the nearly absolute zero deep freeze of space.

The Times article is long, but if you're a space geek, you'll want to read the whole thing. I couldn't tell you the last time I watched PBS, but I think "The Farthest" is getting scheduled on the DVR.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

The great divide is not between black and white, or male and female. We
are turning into two races: Eloi who play video games and Morlocks who
program them. The July 3 New York Times reported, "By 2015, American men
31 to 55 were working about 163 fewer hours a year than that same age
group did in 2000. Men 21 to 30 were working 203 fewer hours a
year...video games have been responsible for reducing the amount of work
that young men do by 15 to 30 hours over the course of a year. Between
2004 and 2015, young men’s leisure time grew by 2.3 hours a week. A
majority of that increase — 60 percent — was spent playing video games."

If you enlarge the definition of Morlocks from the people who program video games to the people who design the computers those games run on, and all the other engineers and technicians of all kinds: electrical, mechanical, aerospace, and more, I'm there with him. I have as much respect for a mechanic who can keep a modern jet engine running optimally as the team who designed it.

Goldman goes on to draw a few contrasts.

Three hundred years ago, pretty
much everyone knew how their technology worked. Europe had lived for a
millennium on the innovations of the Carolingian Renaissance: the water
wheel, the horse collar, and three-field crop rotation. Everyone knew
how a water wheel worked. Water pushed the paddles and gears turned the
millstones. Not everyone knew how a steam engine worked, but a lot of
people did. The same applied to internal combustion engines.

Not only were those technologies easy to understand: They were easy to
make. Any competent carpenter could build a water wheel. The Wright
brothers built their first airplane in a bicycle shop. Henry Ford made
his first internal combustion engine out of spare parts in a backroom at
the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit.

How many people know how a computer works? Solid-state electronics depends on quantum theory, which is understood by one in 10,000 Americans at best. To build a competitive integrated circuit now requires a multi-billion-dollar plant. A numerically minuscule elite invents the technologies we use every day, and a handful of large corporations access the capital required to manufacture them.

He argues that today's technology is too complex. It's true that as recently as the early 1960s, only a couple of guys were required to design a state of the art radio, (I've met some of them) while today's equivalent radios require a team of hardware and software engineers, with each of those broad categories having several specializations. It's the rare engineer who can understand all of those domains and design every piece. To do so is discouraged in the industry for the simple reason that the product gets on the market faster when a team works in parallel than if one guy does everything one subsection at a time.

To dwell on this is to miss the big point: it's that "numerically minuscule elite" that leads all progress in our world and for a nation to have real influence, they need to ruthlessly select for them in a free market of education and ideas. To deny the opportunity to compete for that education to some portion of its citizens is likely self-defeating, but only the best should advance. Meritocracy, not equality.

Today there are two billion Asians whose parents were immured in utter backwardness who now have a chance at the brass ring. China graduates four times as many STEM bachelors as the United States and twice as many PhDs; a generation ago the Chinese university system had just begun to pick itself up out of the ruins of the Cultural Revolution
...
Part of the glue that held the Chinese imperial system together these past three thousand years is the chance that every Chinese has to get rich by passing what used to be the Mandarin examination.
...
The byword in American education is "No child left behind." In Singapore, it's "You must be exceptional to survive."

America is at a distinct disadvantage to Asia. We are numerically quite a bit smaller than China or India. That means fewer to choose from to find that minuscule fraction.

While the idiots on the left are consumed with equality of outcomes for everyone, rather than the equality of opportunities, Goldman gives the simple, inescapably true message that we should ruthlessly search for excellence instead.

If we focus on equality rather than excellence, we will be overwhelmed by the rest of the world. A generation from now there will be a word for an American who works for
an Asian: "Employed." Our future lies in the talented few, not the
mediocre masses -- and if we repudiate them, the future will repudiate
us.

Are we headed for another dark ages? Cloistered in the future equivalents of monasteries may be the people who know how to do things: the Morlocks.

A commenter there retold a story that I know I've seen before, and I'll bet most of you have, too.

I remember a story about how some archeologists excavated a Roman
villa in East Anglia and found that while it was occupied by Romans soon
after the conquest of Brittania it had all the comforts of civilization
including central heating. As they continued to excavate they found
strange burn marks in what was the great room which were accurately
dated to a time three or four generations after the Romans left. Why
the burn marks? Campfires. Within 100 years the people living there
had forgotten how to make central heating work. They had probably
forgotten that it existed at all.

Similarly, records kept by the
Romans showed agricultural productivity for the same area three times
what it would be when the Domesday Book started keeping records again.
The farmers after the fall of Rome not only COULDN'T achieve that
productivity, they didn't know it existed in the first place.

A modern generation Digital Signal Processor chip. It takes the industrial might of billion dollar companies along with teams of engineers to design and make these. If society collapses, I can easily see us losing the knowledge of how to make these. I can see after a generation without them, people not being able to imagine they existed at all.

Yesterday evening, as I was gathering thoughts to put together a post, I got to hear one of those things that every homeowner knows and dreads, "there's water coming out of the air conditioner in the garage".

Thankfully it was fairly routine, but it did suck up the few hours of evening.

By nature, central air conditioners suck in air that's warmer and damper than the air they condition and exhaust. The humidity condenses on the cooling coils, then drains down to a trough where it's routed to a PVC pipe and outside. If you've ever had or seen a window-mounted air conditioner, you know they just dripped the water outside. A central system is usually located somewhere more like a living space, garage or attic or something else like that, so they pipe the water out of the house. Since those pipes are carrying water, it's common for them to fill up with algae and cleaning them out is routine maintenance. We pour some bleach into that pipe and clean it out about every 90 days. Less frequently, the water trough below the coils needs to be cleaned out, and that's what was overflowing and dripping on the floor. Some disassembly, some time with the wet/dry shop vac, and it's cleaned out.

I found this picture online - it looks like a brand new set of evaporator coils, but it shows the design of the water collection. Put that in a metal box the size of the bottom tray and that's the space to work in.

The air flow is from the bottom up, through the inclined evaporator coils that look like car radiators, and the water that condenses on the radiator fins drips down into that tray at the bottom.

And by the way, there may be exceptions but I say don't buy a house with the air conditioner indoor unit in the attic, because someday it will drip water, and having that water coming through your ceiling is a worse thing than having it drip onto an unsealed concrete floor, where it absorbs into the floor and drains through it.

Monday, August 14, 2017

A friend sent me this interesting video of a guy from the Czech Republic recreating the process to build Nixie Tubes. Nixie tubes are vacuum tubes that were used most often in the late 60s to early 70s as a numeric display. They used separate elements shaped like the numbers 0-9, each element switched on when desired. They were largely replaced by seven-segment LED displays by the mid-70s; seven segment LEDs only needed seven control wires vs. the nine wires for a Nixie.

I recommend watching in full screen, but it's almost 40 minutes long and I know that's "TL:DW" for many.

I find the story fascinating. Dalibor Farny, ran across a Nixie tube in 2011. He became enchanted by the technology and decided he needed to learn how to make them. He built a garden shed and started adding machines. Eventually he had to rent space in a nearby castle. Along the way, he found that most of the secrets to successfully making Nixie tubes had been lost to time, having passed away with the engineers and technicians that built them. That knowledge had to be recreated.

Today, his business is expanding and a success story. The story of his road from interest to production is at his website.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Long time readers may have noticed that I've often said that I worked in electronics manufacturing in Florida for my entire career - since the mid '70s - and the only constant has been people telling me that we don't manufacture anything in the US. In the 70s, most of the TV stereo and other consumer electronics pretty much vanished in the US, with Japan being the place everyone talked about.

What happened, though, wasn't that manufacturing shut down; it shifted to higher margin products. TVs and mass-production stereos are low margin products. Amateur gear, for example, was higher end. It came under intense price competition from the Japanese companies, the so-called Big Three of Icom, Kenwood, and Yaesu, but high end ham gear from RL Drake, Rockwell Collins, and others continued to be made in the US long after most consumer electronics was overseas. There are still a host of smaller companies in America making and selling ham radio gear - along with high end audio gear, commercial radios, and all sorts of products that aren't amenable to turning on a production line and shipping millions of units.

I started my career at a company that made measurement and control peripherals for other manufacturing companies. They eventually sold these peripherals into the nuclear power industry. As such, they stressed ultimate reliability, and high-end, high-reliability electronics is the backbone of American manufacturing. I worked there six years. After that, I worked in DOD aerospace systems for a contractor for 13 years, followed with 20 at Major Avionics Corporation.

The point of this isn't to show off my 40 years in electronics; it's to point out how, despite the constant claims of the death of manufacturing America, there's a healthy electronics manufacturing sector in the US that's doing fine. There always has been and always will be a constant struggle to increase productivity - to always do more with less - but the sector is fine. Taken by itself, US manufacturing is the 9th largest economy in the world. That is, the manufacturing sector in the US produces more than the GDP of all but eight countries in the world (one of which is the rest of the US).

We're hearing a lot about this on the news these days, as an undercurrent to the chatter about North Korea. We can't put a pressure on China, the pundits say, what if they start a trade war? We'll have nothing in the stores! There would be a period of adaptation, but the profit motive is strong and I have no doubt things could start flowing.

In the most recent data, manufacturers contributed $2.18 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2016. This figure has risen since the second quarter of 2009, when manufacturers contributed $1.70 trillion.

The vast majority of manufacturing firms in the United States are quite small. In
2014, there were 251,901 firms in the manufacturing sector, with all
but 3,749 firms considered to be small (i.e., having fewer than 500
employees). In fact, three-quarters of these firms have fewer than 20
employees.

There are 12.3 million manufacturing workers in the United States, accounting for 9 percent of the workforce. Since the end of the Great Recession, manufacturers have hired more
than 800,000 workers.

In 2015, the average manufacturing worker in the United States earned $81,289 annually, including pay and benefits.
The ... average manufacturing worker earned nearly
$26.00 per hour, according to the latest figures, not including
benefits.

Over the past 25 years, U.S.-manufactured goods exports have quadrupled.

Manufacturers have experienced
tremendous growth over the past couple decades, making them more “lean”
and helping them become more competitive globally. Output
per hour for all workers in the manufacturing sector has increased by
more than 2.5 times since 1987. ... Note that durable goods
manufacturers have seen even greater growth, almost tripling its labor
productivity over that time frame.

Over the next decade, nearly 3½ million manufacturing jobs will
likely be needed, and 2 million are expected to go unfilled due to the
skills gap. Moreover, according to a recent report, 80 percent
of manufacturers report a moderate or serious shortage of qualified
applicants for skilled and highly-skilled production positions.

Manufactured goods exports have grown substantially to our
largest trading partners since 1990, including to Canada, Mexico and
even China. .. The United States enjoyed a $12.7 billion
manufacturing trade surplus with its trade agreement partners in 2015,
compared with a $639.6 billion deficit with other countries.

World trade in manufactured goods has more than doubled between 2000 and 2014—from $4.8 trillion to $12.2 trillion. ... U.S. consumption of manufactured goods (domestic
shipments and imports) equaled $4.1 trillion in 2014, equaling about 34
percent of global trade in manufactured goods.

The cost of federal regulations fall disproportionately on manufacturers, particularly those that are smaller. Manufacturers
pay $19,564 per employee on average to comply with federal regulations,
or nearly double the $9,991 per employee costs borne by all firms as a
whole. In addition, small manufacturers with less than 50 employees
spend 2.5 times the amount of large manufacturers. Environmental
regulations account for 90 percent of the difference in compliance costs
between manufacturers and the average firm.

Manufacturers in the United States perform more than
three-quarters of all private-sector research and development (R&D)
in the nation, driving more innovation than any other sector. R&D
in the manufacturing sector has risen from $126.2 billion in 2000 to
$229.9 billion in 2014. In the most recent data, pharmaceuticals
accounted for nearly one-third of all manufacturing R&D, spending
$74.9 billion in 2014. Aerospace, chemicals, computers, electronics and
motor vehicles and parts were also significant contributors to R&D
spending in that year.

I think that the revolution in small scale manufacturing that I've talked about many times is going to play a part in the growth of manufacturing over the coming years. It's the new industrial revolution. Interpreting the second bullet point that, "The vast majority of manufacturing firms are quite small," works out to almost 189,000 manufacturing firms with fewer than 20 employees. That number of firms is going to skyrocket as people who might never think of having a product find ways to develop and make things that others want.

I think that the most common manufacturing facility is going to look a lot less like a big car assembly line and a lot more like a Makerspace. Or hobby machine shop.

Friday, August 11, 2017

It's time to rename the Grail Gun (references and stuff) and do an official Christening. I'm thinking its name should be "The Precious". I suppose I'm open to better ideas.

We had planned on getting up a little before 6AM, which gets us to our club range with enough time before it opens to let us get some targets placed and be ready at the appointed hour. When we got out of bed it was overcast and had been raining off and on all
night. The forecast was for the rain to be ending and stay offshore all
day. So we went anyway and it stayed (blessedly, gloriously) cloudy
all morning. The sun didn't come out and it didn't even get above 90
until after we left around 10:30.

In the intervening two weeks since my last report, I had decided to re-zero the scope at 100 yards instead of 25 so I started at 100 yards. Everything went exactly the same as last time. With the cross hairs at the very
bottom of the target, the POI was about 8" above that. My Nikon says
"1 click = 1/8" at 100 yds" so with 8 clicks to the inch, I counted 48
clicks and lowered my point of impact by 6". As a long-former coworker used to say, "prediction is the essence of science".
Then I put the crosshairs on the center of the target and watched the
shot come in about an inch high. No mysteries. Clicked it down another eight or 10 clicks and again, it moved as expected. I was finishing a box of Hornady Precision Hunter, and grabbed two shots carefully placed. My SubMOA phone app tells me they were 0.31 MOA; just barely touching holes.

Precision Hunter uses a 143 Grain Hornady ELD-X bullet, but it's not "match grade" ammo. I had half a box of 140 gr Hornady ELD Match and switched to it for this

That's a three shot group. Marginally better than the Precision Hunter. I expected it to be better, but "more better" than that. (Strangely, I don't see the exact box I have to show you; it's a white box while this one isn't - but it has the same description)

I decided to stretch it to 200 yards. With the
rifle zeroed at 100 yards, the Ballistics App says that 100 is the peak of
the parabola and the round will drop 2.77" by 200 yards. Reality
agrees. This is a real series of three shots at 200 yards, after a
couple of rounds to get a feel for the distance.

The target is kind of messy. That group at the bottom is a set of three shots in sequence. The hole just above those three at about 1:00
was before that string and the one a diameter farther above at 11:00 was a
few minutes later, after helping Mrs. Graybeard with something. If I include
those two separated shots, I get this

It opens up to half an MOA. The hole to the left of the
11:00 round, crossing the yellow ring around the 2" red center, and the other hole down on the bottom of the picture are a totally different ammo with a totally different point of aim: Hornady American Whitetail 129 grain soft point, a while later.

Truly awful, isn't it? ;-)

The American Whitetail 129 grain soft point was very disappointing. I shot a box of it. It fell more than the heavier bullets and didn't pattern anywhere near as well. I don't have a good picture (switched to the iPhone through the spotting scope), but it filled 1-1/2 to 2 MOA. Also used a handful of rounds to ring a steel plate at 200 yards.

All in all, a fun couple of hours with The Precious. Learning new skills is always fun, and I'm sure I have more learning ahead.

Hurricane season may ramp up a bit over the next 7-10
days w/action in southern Gulf of Mexico and in the far Atlantic w/Cape
Verde system.

A 10-12 day forecast of a developing tropical storm off the coast of
Africa is the next frontier of tropical weather forecasting in 2020s.

Both mesoscale hurricane models HMON and HWRF develop wave off Africa
(Invest 99L) into a powerful hurricane in 5-days in open Atlantic.

The 8/5 WUWT post includes impressive simulated pictures of this tropical wave as a monster hurricane. That peaked my interest, so I've been keeping on eye on it. Here's the 2:00 PM update of the National Hurricane Center's Tropical Weather Outlook. This storm is the yellow X on the right - the notation "1 (20%)" refers to this storm.

What I find interesting here is just how spectacularly wrong the model was. Dr. Maue’s August 4th tweet said that two of the leading edge models, "HMON and HWRF develop wave off Africa
(Invest 99L) into a powerful hurricane in 5-days in open Atlantic."
How well did they predict? It’s six days later and 99L never became a powerful hurricane; it never even became a
tropical storm. It’s still a disorganized tropical wave with the NHC giving it a
20% chance of development in the next 48 hours, up to 40% chance within
5 days. The spaghetti runs show it re-curving out to the North
Atlantic, staying a few hundred miles offshore.

It's hard to imagine how the models could be more wrong. I suppose it could have dissipated, but that’s not
much worse.

Remember Dr. Maue said A 10-12 day forecast of a
developing tropical storm off the coast of Africa is the next frontier
of tropical weather forecasting in 2020s. I suppose this means we have to wait for the 2020s – maybe the late 2020s – because these results sure aren’t there, yet. This is not to imply the models are hopeless, only that they're not done. The only way they'll get better is if the model writers keep relentlessly looking at why they got things wrong and trying to improve them.

Long time readers may recall that last October, within 24 hours of closest approach, the NHC forecast
Hurricane Matthew to be over my head as a Cat IV storm. Actual closest approach
was about 50 miles away and a much weaker cat II. We didn’t get
hurricane force winds. That’s an enormous difference in the risk from
the storm, since wind damage scales as velocity squared. I'd like to see them more accurate at 24 hours, let alone at 10 days.

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

That's a trick question. We're already at war with North Korea and have been since the early '50s. The 1953 Korean War was ended with a ceasefire, the 1953 armistice, not a surrender and declaration of the end of the war.

The communist nation also said it would complete its
strategy to attack the waters near the U.S. territory of Guam by
mid-August.

North Korea would then wait for its leader Kim Jong Un's
order to strike, with its military stating that “only absolute force”
would work on Trump.

This strikes me as a bad sign because it's continuing the continuous escalation we've been watching for months now, but I don't have a scale that reads how bad it is. Considering what appears to be their cultural predilection to bombastic hyperbole, I don't know how worked up we should get. As LL says, though, threatening Guam "...
takes the situation to another level - where it didn't need to go. But it's what the Norks want to do, and they've been wanting it for a long time. The mouse will get one last
roar off."

Nuclear weapons are an odd thing. It seems that with the exception of the two times that we used them (including 72 years ago today) the principle use for having nuclear weapons is as a deterrent. Essentially, the lesson I see in the 20th century is that if you have nuclear weapons, nobody messes with you. It's a Mutual Assured Destruction club that everyone with enough nuclear weapons joins. No one without nukes would start a war with the superpowers that would justify a nuclear response because they'd be utterly destroyed. But the doctrine of MAD essentially said countries wouldn't protect their citizens so that the other guys' missiles were still a deterrent. After all, if you can swat away their warheads with no damage, and they have to absorb your hits, there's nothing "mutual" about that. Many found MAD to be morally abhorrent, but there has never been a nuclear exchange or use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki, 72 years ago.

Virtual Mirage quotes a statement from the DPRK saying that the moment they see something that looks like we're planning a preemptive strike, they'll pre-preemptively strike us first.

“The US should remember, however, that once there is observed a sign of
action for ‘preventive war’ from the US, the army of the DPRK will turn
the US mainland into the theatre of a nuclear war before the inviolable
land of the DPRK turns into the one.”

Do they honestly think they can defeat the US? (By the way, that paragraph includes some impossible physics as a bonus)

“The DPRK is an invincible ideological power in which all the service
personnel and people are united around their leader in single mind and a
country of an impregnable fortress in which all the people are armed
and the whole country has been fortified.”

An invincible ideological power? A country of an impregnable fortress? See my previous references to "what appears to be their cultural predilection to bombastic hyperbole". The first paragraph, though, is fraught with problems. The Norks aren't an experienced military. It's entirely possible fighting could break out by their simple misinterpretation of something innocent our forces are doing.

LL says he personally thinks, "the Norks themselves are past the point of no-return" and active fighting is on the way. It looks like it. If this 60 year armistice breaks and goes kinetic, it's going to be very, very bad. It's going to make bad days in the Sandbox look good (and the anniversary of the worst was a couple of days ago, too). There are over 20 million people in Seoul, South Korea, and it has long been said the North has enough conventional artillery aimed at the city to level it. Millions dead? Could be.

The hurricane warnings from the National Hurricane Center have a pretty good phrase they use. The warnings are the final notice that the storm is expected to hit, and they include the advice, "all preparations should be rushed to completion". It looks like a storm is coming. Pay heed.

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

While Artificial Intelligence gets a lot of press and is probably the most talked about coming technology. You've probably heard the story about Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Steven Hawking all warning of the dangers of "strong AI". Escaping from an AI that goes all Skynet on our primitive asses is one reason that Musk wants to colonize Mars.

A technology that's advancing arguably faster than AI is micro robotics, or microbotics; robots that are around a millimeter long (~.040") or smaller. Did you ever see the 1966 SciFi movie "Fantastic Voyage"? An important scientist suffers an assassination attempt. In a bold move to rescue him, a submarine and its crew is shrunk with a secret ray and injected into him. The miniature submarine will navigate through his body until it comes to the damage and repair it from the inside. With suitable dramatics and heroics involved.

While neither submarines or Raquel Welch in a white wetsuit are mentioned in anyone's plans, the idea being widely discussed is to use miniature robots in place of our cruder tools for micro-surgical repairs or to deliver chemotherapy more precisely:

[Researcher Bradley] Nelson wants to load tiny robots with drugs and manoeuvre them to the
precise location in the human body where treatment is needed, for
instance to the site of a cancer tumour. Alternatively, the tiny
creatures could also be fitted with instruments, allowing operations to
be performed without surgical intervention. The advantages compared with
conventional treatments with drugs are clear: far more targeted
therapy, and as a result, fewer side effects.

Many of the elements of microbotic tech have already made it into
our lives, they're just a few generations away from the right size. Our smartphones and tablets almost all have a
gyroscope that operates on MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical Systems) principles. Hundreds of millions of MEMS accelerometers are used in automatically-retracting seat belts in hundreds of millions of cars around the world. It's the continued advancement of MEMS and nanoscale machinery that will bring us micro- and eventually nano-sized robotics.

The revolution will come when these devices reach a sufficiently low
cost and a high level of sophistication—i.e., when sensors, processing
power, a mode of locomotion, and a method of storing or harvesting
energy are combined. As research in MEMS and nanotechnology inexorably
progresses, this will happen, and micro-sized robots will make the
transition from conceptual curiosities to fully realized parts of our
lives.

(Robo Bees from Harvard University)

In addition to the medical uses already talked about, we can expect to see medical robots that will map our unique physiologies, clean the plaque out of arteries,
and destroy kidney stones. They will help diagnose and combat disease
and be used to fight cancer. I believe that before they're injected into people on a large scale, microbots will monitor and perhaps repair machinery and infrastructure. They will also become another tool
for manufacturing.

As with AI, there's a darker side to microbotics.

What effect will legions of nearly invisible robots have on our privacy?
Will they close the gap between the part of our lives that is logged
and recorded and that final bit left to us? They may be exactly what our
neighbors, or employers, or the powers-that-be use to take the last of
our privacy. Every time you leave work, you could be carrying an army of
microscopic voyeurs.

Microbots will change warfare. They can be used to attack an enemy’s weapons and equipment and the manufacturing facilities that produce munitions. They will almost certainly be used to attack the enemies themselves in some capacity. Even if they aren’t used to kill, they may be used to disrupt an enemy’s biology enough to reduce their effectiveness. Microbotics used for warfare may end up being classified as a kind of weapon of mass destruction.

It should come as no surprise that SciFi writers have already gone here, too. Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age explores the concept of well-resourced groups fighting each other with clouds of microbots. Who launched the attack against a nation may never be known, and the only clue would be clumps of the microbots littering the ground - looking like dumped printer toner.

(ViRob - a robot currently undergoing tests for treating Hydrocephalus, also known as “water in the brain,” in both infants and the elderly. It would be left in place permanently, or long term.)

It can be effectively argued that all technologies bring aspects that are scary, regardless of all the good they might bring; and virtually all technologies can go through a period of waiting for consumer acceptance. In this case, microbotics and AI both share scary dark sides. It's also the case that technologies look less scary "in the daylight"; once we see them and get familiar with them.

Monday, August 7, 2017

A year ago, I wrote about a Kickstarter campaign for a small-shop waterjet cutting machine called the Wazer. They're still not on the market (their web site talks about pre-ordering), so they're still not quite vaporware and not quite product. While the Wazer is a CNC-based cutter, it might be useful to have the technnology for other sorts of cuts.

This month's Make magazine features an out-of-the-box development: a waterjet cutter for a couple of hundred bucks. The Wazer is a $4500 machine. Author Ben Krasnow looked around at what he could easily get and started figuring out how to create a waterjet cutter.

Ben does something truly noteworthy. He creates a usable waterjet
cutter, capable of cutting through metal, wood, and other material. He
accomplishes this using a rig he put together for only a few hundred
dollars. The heart of the system is a Sun Joe pressure washer that he
bought for $150 on Amazon.

Without buying the magazine, the best source of information on how to replicate his cutter is his 22 minute long video on YouTube. Information on sources and how to get everything is in the "Show More" tab on YouTube, so you need to go there for that information, but he got most of these parts from two places: AccuStream (a waterjet parts supplier) and McMaster-Carr.

Ben’s cobbled-together rig might not look like much, but it does get the
job done. In the video, you see him cutting through 1/16″ aluminum (at
~2″/min with .4 lbs/min of abrasive @3200psi), 1/8″ aluminum (at about
1/2 the cutting speed, abrasive and psi values the same), 3/8″ hardwood,
styrofoam (in water-only/no abrasive mode), and bread (yes, bread).

He cuts the styrofoam and bread with only water, but water isn't very useful for cutting. The agent used is coarse garnet abrasive grains, and the purpose of the water is to accelerate the abrasive to speeds that allow it to work. It also probably cools the work area, too. Garnet is a moderately hard stone that has historically been used as an abrasive - you can still buy garnet paper. It's a non-toxic, safe abrasive, just a harder version of the silicon dioxide sand in sandpaper. The source he links to sells it at about 50cents/lb, so when you look at the 0.4 lbs/minute cuts they describe, you can think 20 cents/minute to cut the aluminum he demonstrated.

For the abrasives hopper, after doing research into commercial hoppers,
he realized that they’re basically just a gravity-fed tub with a hole in
the bottom (and a means of adjusting the amount of abrasive). So, he
made his own.

Now, cool as it is to develop a usable waterjet cutter that can cost the builder under $500, I'm not sure where this fits in. The attraction of a waterjet is that it cuts materials that are difficult to precisely machine: things like carbon fiber or fiberglass laid up panels, or glass. Industrially, they're also used to cut steel and other hard metals, not just the aluminum he cuts. I don't think this one has the horsepower to cut harder metals. Cutting freehand is probably not any more dangerous than cutting with a moving saw blade. Water at the pressures he's talking about will cut off a finger just as easily as a saw. At the very end of the video, he suggests turning it into something like a CNC machine that moves the work into the waterjet, something like the way large X/Y Plotters roll paper under the pen, or some wood carving machines will roll a board back and forth while the carving tool moves in the other two axes.

Sunday, August 6, 2017

If you tend to assign credibility to Daniel Greenfield ("Sultan Knish") you'll find his article in Friday's Front Page Magazine disturbing. I might dismiss a lesser investigator, but not Greenfield. Hat tip to Mike Miles at 90 Miles From Tyranny for pointing this story out.

Derek Harvey was a man who saw things coming. He had warned of Al
Qaeda when most chose to ignore it. He had seen the Sunni insurgency
rising when most chose to deny it.

The former Army colonel
had made his reputation by learning the lay of the land. In Iraq that
meant sleeping on mud floors and digging into documents to figure out
where the threat was coming from.

It was hard to imagine
anyone better qualified to serve as President Trump’s top Middle East
adviser at the National Security Council than a man who had been on the
ground in Iraq and who had seen it all.

Just like in Iraq, Harvey began digging at the NSC. He came up with a list of Obama holdovers who were leaking to the press. McMaster, the new head of the NSC, refused to fire any of them.

McMaster had a different list of people he wanted to fire. It was easy to make the list. Harvey was on it.

Derek Harvey was fired in July, apparently for not being adamantly pro-Muslim brotherhood, and pro-Obama. Harvey wasn't alone. McMaster also purged Ezra Watnick-Cohen, who had exposed the eavesdropping on Trump officials by Obama personnel and provided proof to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. Watnick-Cohen's replacement? Linda Weisgold, Obama's Director of the CIA Office of Terrorism Analysis, who helped draft the Benghazi talking points which blamed the Islamic terrorist attack on a video protest.

According to the media, Watnick-Cohen was guilty of “anti-Muslim
fervor” and “hardline views.” And there’s no room for anyone telling the
truth about Islamic terrorism at McMaster’s NSC.

McMaster had even demanded that President Trump refrain from telling the truth about Islamic terrorism.

Another of his targets was Rich Higgins,
who had written a memo warning of the role of the left in undermining
counterterrorism. Higgins had served as a director for strategic
planning at the NSC and had warned in plain language about the threats of
Islamic terrorism, of Sharia law, of the Hijrah colonization by Islamic
migrants, of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of its alliance with the left
as strategic threats. He was fired for identifying a security threat to the US. Kinda sounds like the whole point of the NSC, doesn't it?

McMaster forced K.T. McFarland out of her role as Deputy National Security Advisor. If you've watched Fox News in the last 20 years, you'll recognize K.T.. She was an Oxford and Cambridge grad, worked on a Ph.D. at MIT, and had worked at the Pentagon for the Reagan administration. Her replacement? Dina Habib-Powell, an Egyptian-American immigrant and former Bush gatekeeper whose pals included Huma Abedin and Valerie Jarrett.

Habib-Powell had attended the Iftar dinner with members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups. You can see her photographed at the American Task Force of Palestine gala. The ATFP was originally Rashid Khalidi’s American Committee on Jerusalem. She was there as a
presenter at the Middle East Institute after a speech by Hanan Ashrawi.
Her achievements under Bush included cultural exchanges with Iran, as
well as cash for the Palestinian Authority and for Lebanon after the
Hezbollah war with Israel.

As Caroline Glick has pointed out, the personnel being purged in the McMaster coup “are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal.”

When Adam Lovinger urged that “more attention be given to the threat of Iran and Islamic extremism,” his security clearance was revoked. Robin Townley was forced out in the same way.

You probably noticed the story go by this week that:

McMaster sent a letter
to Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Adviser, assuring her
that the NSC would work with her to “allow you access to classified
information.” He claimed that Rice's continued access to classified
information is "consistent with the national security interests of the
United States."

Why does Susan Rice, who is alleged to have
participated in the Obama eavesdropping on Trump people, need access to
classified information? What national security purpose is served by it?

Nothing good can come from this. "In my days", clearances were only granted on a basis of "Need to know". According to that link and journalist Sara Carter, McMaster specifically said, “I hereby waive the requirement that you must have a ‘need-to-know’ to
access any classified information contained in items you 'originated,
reviewed, signed or received while serving,' as National Security
Adviser,”. In my book that's a big red warning flag emblazoned "WTF?". Why should she need that clearance? The best place for Susan Rice is far, far from anywhere important.

The purge of "America First" ideology is only starting. Rumor is McMaster has a hit list. You can bet that under his remodeling the NSC will be more like the way Obama would like it than what Trump supporters would like to see. You can be sure that will include that the Iran Deal must stay, that Islam has
nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, that we need to find ways to work
with the aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that Israel must
make concessions to terrorists.

I think of myself as a reasonable guy. I'd like to hear "the other
side". In a situation like this, where none of us can see the inside,
there's always a risk that these events are being interpreted the wrong
way. On the other hand, there's a strong circumstantial case
that Daniel Greenfield is right and this is the inside-the-beltway
swamp fighting back and removing everyone that agrees with Trump and his
supporters. By coincidence, Derek Hunter at Town Hall had a column
today "We’re Witnessing A Slow-Rolling Coup" about the media/Democratic Party complex in an active attempt to destroy the president and the results of the last election.

Saturday, August 5, 2017

Originally located in Wareham, Massachusetts, Tremont Nail Company
has been making cut nails since 1819. Gary Franklin’s
great-great-grandfather started working at Tremont as a nailer in the
1850’s, and since then five generations of Franklins have worked as
nailers at Tremont. It’s all part of a heritage that Tremont is very
proud of.

The machines themselves haven't been in the factory since 1819, but the company web page says many of them are 125 years old, making steel nails the same way they were made in the 1890s. The video (you've got to spend the 3-1/2 minutes to see the machines making nails) speaks of the very first nail-making machines being invented by Ezekiel Reed in the late 1700s and the company speaks about them being used at Tremont from their founding in 1819.

Gary Franklin taking a quick inspection of a nail. A few years after joining Tremont Nail Company in the 1850s, Gary's great-great-grandfather was drafted to go fight in the civil war. When he got out, he went back to work there. He says, "my dad actually worked with his grandfather and his great-grandfather for a short spell". For his part, Gary says he started working there in 1981, so he has been making nails for over 35 years. He has a 13 year old son, who may some day join the long lines of his family.

I'll bet that, like me, most of you dear readers wouldn't think that nails are still made in America, and that maybe one or two people knows about Tremont nail.

Friday, August 4, 2017

In the never-ending search to suck up money from gullible states, Armatix GmbH introduced the iP1 "Smart Pistol". Am I being too harsh on them? When there are states (the Peoples' Republic of New Jersey for one) which have laws saying that once "Smart Guns" are on the market, they will be mandatory in the state - that's potentially a lot of captive sales. The iP1 is .22 semiautomatic pistol that will only fire if the owner's watch is present and within near field distances of the gun. At least that's their selling story.

Captive sales? Considering you can buy a "dumb" 22 semiautomatic for under $300, and this one is $1500, if PRNJ mandated no .22 handguns can be sold in state except for their product, that's a huge windfall for the manufacturers.

The problem is that like a lot of smart appliances, TVs and IOT devices, it's not that smart. In the run-up to this week's DefCon security conference, The Hacker News is reporting that a security researcher who goes by the alias "Plore" has found several ways to hack the gun and make it usable by people other than the watch wearer or prevent its use by the wearer. None of the advantages of a smart gun the owner is paying $1500 for. The simplest hack doesn't require much in the way of user intelligence, just a few rare earth magnets and knowledge of where to put them.

However, Plore found three ways to hack
into the Armatix IP1 smart gun, and even demonstrated (the video is
given below) that he could make the smart gun fire without the security
smartwatch anywhere near it.

Plore placed $15 [worth of] magnets near the barrel of the gun, doing this made him bypass the security watch, thereby defeating the Armatix IP1’s electromagnetic locking system altogether. [text added - SiG]

There's more at the article, but they're discouraging embedding the video.

When the user tries to fire the gun, a transmitter inside it sends a signal to the watch and listens for a reply. Plore was able to add an amplifier to the watch so the gun could be quite a bit farther from the watch (although I don't think you see him fire from more than 10 feet from the watch). Perhaps more handy for the nefarious to know, he was able to set a jammer on the frequency they communicated over (916.5 MHz) and jam the gun so that it would not fire even with the watch present. (This seems like a classic "near/far" problem - to keep anyone in a good-sized area from using their iP1 would require substantial transmitter power). Again, perhaps the most interesting hack was that by holding some rare earth magnets in the right spot on the pistol's slide, he made the gun work with no watch present at all.

In the tradition of "white hat hackers", Plore notified Armatix of the vulnerabilities he found. They didn't say they were going to do something right away but said something like, "lessons learned on the iP1 will flow into the next generations of the smart gun system". Maybe not the best response in the history of the world, but better than having him arrested for finding the problem.

Thursday, August 3, 2017

While I'm not as big a fan of America's Cup-level yacht racing as Zendo Deb at 357 Magnum, I really appreciate watching it and I'm especially appreciative of the technology. See, there's a hidden problem that they all fight against - the physics of going fast in water, about 800 times denser than air. While there are ways to gain small bits of advantage, the speed of a hull in the water is limited by the waves it creates passing through that water. There's a well-defined speed that the boat can't go above.

For a displacement hull - one in which the entire water line of the boat is in the water - the hull speed is mathematically related to the hull length. The exact shape of the hull matters for the exact number, but you can get within an engineer's rule of thumb by remembering Speed = SQRT (1.8 * waterline length). (Where SQRT is the square root of the term in parentheses). Waterline length in feet gives the speed in knots. This quickly tells you the longer the boat, the faster it can go. For example, the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford was just launched, and while the Wikipedia page doesn't specify the length along the waterline, they give the overall length as 1106 feet. Based on some photographs on that page, let's guess the waterline length is closer to 1000 feet. That immediately tells us that the maximum speed for the Ford is around 42.4 knots - or about 48.8 statute mph.

You've probably seen racing powerboats. These boats are tiny in comparison to the Gerald R Ford, one class is 30' feet long, but they can do 70 mph on the ocean. They hydroplane, where the power of the engine and shape of the hull work to push most of the hull out of and on top of the water. Because most of the hull is out of the water, drag is reduced and they're not limited by the physics of waves that sets the displacement hull speed. Most "bass boats" and other outboard fishing boats also hydroplane, so you're probably used to seeing that.

When just one of these L-shaped components are in the water, the 3-to-6
ft. airfoil on the bottom creates enough lift as it is pulled through
the water to lift the entire boat (about a 3-ton load). The daggerboards
also convert side forces into driving or forward-pointing forces. With
the boat “flying” above the surface of the water, drag is substantially
reduced and the boat’s speed increases dramatically. American Cup Class
yachts now sail at up to 60 mph, four times faster than the
single-hulled boats in the 2007 race.

If you look carefully, you can see the entire boat is in the air except for one foil in the water, on the right hull of the catamaran. The crew is huddled on the left hull to counterbalance it.

With the entire race (lots and lots of bucks) riding on the daggerboard, not to mention the three tons of boat and lives of the crew, they gets a lot of attention in design. No amount of computer simulation and analysis is too much - Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are contracted to partner companies. Before that can start, though, strategic design decisions need to be made by informed crew.

The choice of which approach to take—one or two sets of
daggerboards—is not driven by FEA or optimization. It’s a strategic
choice on the part of the teams. “Two boards might give you an advantage
against a team with an all-weather board,” says David Durocher, an
Altair engineer who worked with Team Artemis. “However this comes at the
risk and cost of building backups for both boards.”

FEA does play a role, mainly to evaluate specific design ideas.
Simulation is what allows Altair to come up with the final design
quicker and more economically. “It is faster and much less expensive to
build and run a simulation than to build and run tests on physical
prototypes,” says Durocher. “And we can dramatically improve on this by
automatically finding the best design idea using computational
optimization tools.”

With their extreme demands for strength at light weight, the daggerboards tend to be made from laminated carbon fiber, just as used in high performance aircraft. The designed board is then put through CFD simulations to determine lift and sideways forces it can provide.

A CFD simulation image shows particle velocity vectors of the water passing over the daggerboard. Note the speed up over the top of the foil where the vectors go red.

Exactly when and how to use the daggerboards is a tactical decision made by the yacht's captain.

“The boards are fully raised or fully lowered every time the boat tacks
or jibes, maybe about 20 to 30 times per race,” says Durocher. “And it
takes five to 10 seconds to do this.”

Race series rules say that no power machinery is allowed, so several of the crew—usually large, muscular sailors referred to as
grinders—spend most of their time turning cranks that power a hydraulic
pump. Hydraulic power is then used to move various components, including
raising and lowering the daggerboards.

The last 35 years has seen a series of advances in the design of these racing sailboats, starting with the Australians' winged keel in 1983, and the changes to wing sail designs in the last 10 years that now allow the boats to go faster than the wind pushing them.

It has become a high tech race between groups of sailors backed by groups of engineers. It's long past being a group of yacht boys out for a friendly sailboat race.

The weirdness doesn't stop there. The narrator, the “master of all masters,” of the book is named… Don. In the second book, “1900, Or The Last President,” the election of the new president immediately leads to street protests and violent demonstrations.

In New York City, when the results were announced, swaths of the city
were placed on lockdown due to masses of violent protesters storming
the area.

“Strange to say, the people in the upper portion of
the city made no movement to rush out of their
houses and collect in the public squares, although the
night was clear and beautiful. They sat as if paralyzed with a nameless dread, and when they
conversed it was with bated breath and throbbing
hearts.

In less than half an hour, mounted policemen
dashed through the streets calling out : “ Keep within your houses ; close your doors and barricade
them. The entire East side is in a state of uproar.
Mobs of vast size are organizing under the lead of
Anarchists and Socialists, and threaten to plunder
and despoil the houses of the rich who have wronged
and oppressed them for so many years. Keep within
doors. Extinguish all lights.”

And their rallying cry?

“Our day has come at last. Down with our oppressors! Death to the rich man!
Death to the gold bugs! Death to the capitalists! Give us back the
money you have ground out of us. Give us back the
marrow of our bones which you have used to grease
the wheels of your chariots.”

Which really sounds like it could be an Antifa rally today. Just shows you that those sentiments never change. Well, maybe not the part about chariots.

Another strange reference is the “Fifth Avenue Hotel. As Newsweek
notes, the address in the original book is now where Trump Tower stands
on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. [Bold added throughout - SiG]

The Fifth Avenue Hotel will be the first to feel
the fury of the mob. Would the troops be in time to
save it?

Right now, lots of people are saying, “but what does it mean??” and I say, “absolutely nothing”. None of the names everyone is all wrapped up about are an unusual name, and it's not like the books are predicting “President Donald J Trump” in 2017. It's not predicting the future in any way. It's all just a wonderful, fun bunch of coincidences like the Kennedy-Lincoln coincidences - only not as many.

From here on, intelligent people are not to be described as intelligent. The new term is to be Cognitive Privileged. I'm not making this up.

Privilege in general is “the receipt of certain benefits wholly
through accident of birth and it is “undeniable that privilege itself is
a reality,” the student newspaper explains.

As with skin color and much else, Daily Iowan author Dan Williams
argues, people have no control over how smart they are. Life is a huge
cosmic lottery full of winners and losers.

Cognitive privilege is one of “many kinds of privilege besides white privilege.”

(Illustration that leads the Daily Caller piece)

It's always hard to know if you're being punked in a situation like this. We have a student writing for the student newspaper, and I have to consider it might just be an attempt at satire, but I also have to consider that given all the other stuff coming out of the colleges he's deadly serious.

The author falls into the trap of saying robots are going to take the jobs of all the those that don't have cognitive privilege (which we've written about here several times) and the real privilege of those with cognitive privilege will be to work and pay taxes to support those who don't have cognitive privilege. What an exciting deal! Well, he doesn't put it exactly like that.

Also, Williams declares, robots will wipe out manual labor jobs but
will somehow not affect jobs available to members of a special cognitive
elite.

“Thus, the accident of having been born smart enough to be able to be
successful is a great benefit that you did absolutely nothing to earn.
Consequently, you have nothing to be proud of for being smart.”

He also tries to demonstrate his SJW chops by saying if America is able to accept the idea of cognitive privilege, it will be better equipped to discuss “white privilege” and the “temperature-rising topic of racial privilege”.

I believe it was in the short-lived TV series spinoff from Animal House, called Delta House, where they told one of the pledges if he wanted to get some girls, he just needed to quote some Lawrence Ferlinghetti poetry. Today they say crap like this.

Monday, July 31, 2017

I spent a really long time writing the first part of this, first intending to put it up Saturday, but giving up after a little over two hours. Yesterday I spent more time, perhaps another four hours.

Why? After a while researching, I started feeling like I was being played. Like the whole thing was a scam designed by someone for some unknown purpose (but that probably involved getting lots of government money). It wasn't until I found that graph from the CDC data that I started to think maybe something really is there and there really is an increase in overdose deaths.

I find that getting away from the computer, picking up a guitar and playing some scales and mindless exercises will allow my mind to wander in more productive ways than sitting here. Blogging isn't exactly a high-stress life, but I find that my brain will follow more idea trails when I'm not trying to put together a post. It wasn't until after I posted it and sat down to play that the realization occurred to me that just because there really may be more heroin overdose deaths, that doesn't mean we're not being played. Someone could be taking advantage of a situation that developed on its own.

Cui bono? Who benefits? As always, start by asking that.

Thankfully, while I was playing guitar, Mrs. Graybeard (who can be a much better search engine weenie than me) started asking some questions. It starts with a simple observation: have you noticed the push for every cop, every paramedic and every rescue group in the country to carry naloxone? There was even a story about librarians administering it to addicts to save their lives. Have you heard that the price of naloxone has gone up at least 17 fold in the last few years? And isn't it interesting how everyone has heard the complaints that the makers of (epinephrine) epi pens, Mylan, hiked their prices 4x but no one seems to complain that naloxone has gone up 17x?

Going down that rabbit hole leads directly to Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration. This is according to the Wikileaks emails found here. You should read the whole thing. Someone sleuthing around in the Wikileaks archive posted this (there are grammatical and other errors in here, but I've left the author's words as found):

There seems to be money flowing into the Clinton Foundation from big
pharma. The CEOs are donating to Hillary's campaign. On the campaign
trail I've seen Bill Clinton name drop the drug naloxone. The recent
emails on wikileaks confirms that the one of the goals of the Clinton
Foundation is to make this drug be everywhere. One of the manufactures
of this drug is Hospira, a company recently bought by Pfizer.
...
There seems to be serious conflicts on interest. been the campaign
and the companies. For example Clinton wants to give these campaigns 7.5
billion dollars through federal programs. This is an OP-Ed from Hillary
from last year:

Today I’m releasing a strategy to confront the drug and alcohol
addiction crisis. My plan sets five goals: empower communities to
prevent drug use among teenagers; ensure every person suffering from
addiction can obtain comprehensive treatment; ensure that all first
responders carry naloxone, which can stop overdoses from becoming fatal;
require health care providers to receive training in recognizing
substance use disorders and to consult a prescription drug monitoring
program before prescribing controlled substances; and prioritize
treatment over prison for low-level and nonviolent drug offenders, so we
can end the era of mass incarceration.

The call for Naloxone by name was echoed by Tim Kaine - before he became her running mate in the last election - and by John Podesta. Call it crony capitalism or crony socialism, either way it's corrupt to the core.

The drug isn't under patent, so there can be generics. Hospira/Pfizer is one of only a few manufacturers and they've all jacked their prices up. The defense seems to be "but we don't charge as much as the other guys". Are the prices a function of supply and demand or "get it while the gettin's good"?

The states are jumping on the bandwagon, too - along with first aid instructors and even gun bloggers. Everybody is trying to get first responders to carry naloxone or the narcan nasal spray.

Conspicuous in its absence is that none of the governments seem to be pushing anti-addiction treatments and therapies, just the drugs. Admittedly when someone is comatose and ready to die from their OD, they don't benefit from counseling, but without breaking the addiction cycle they're probably going to need more of the drug someday.

It could be that the cartels are supplying heroin more cheaply than before and usage patterns are shifting to the cheaper heroin. When the cartels cut their heroin with cheaper fentanyl, it's easier for addicts to overdose and die. But the heroin overdose problem is not the myth that it's prescription drugs and it's entirely possible that a bump in heroin deaths is being exploited all the way around.

Invoking the specter of prescription drugs being used improperly appears to be an attempt to lump heroin and prescription drugs together as one massive problem which makes people who are taking prescription drugs for post-surgery pain afraid of becoming addicts or overdosing. They're different problems. There was a National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) run by the department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that said:

According to NSDUH, only a quarter of people who take opioids for
nonmedical reasons get them by obtaining a doctor's prescription. Hence
the sequence that many people imagine -- a patient takes narcotics for
pain, gets hooked, and eventually dies of an overdose -- is far from
typical of opioid-related deaths.

According to that linked article, opioid-related deaths are rare even for patients who take narcotics
every day for years. The CDC cites "a recent study of patients aged
15-64 years receiving opioids for chronic noncancer pain" who were
followed for up to 13 years. The researchers found that "one in 550
patients died from opioid-related overdose," which is a risk of less
than 0.2 percent. (I would assume from how that's worded that the study was not just on 550 patients, but on a bigger number. A study of 550 people would be too small).

So what do I think is going on? First the disclaimer: bear in mind that I'm a paranoid old man (although not as paranoid as some of y'all!). Conclusion, we are being played. We're being played by the makers of naloxone, and those few drugs used to treat addicts and ODs. We're also being played by the "addiction treatment industry" and recreational drug lobby that want to normalize heroin (like these folks, I think). They're scaremongering. If they can convince Soccer Mom Suzy that heroin from the Mexican cartels is like the pain pills that she gets when she gets a wisdom tooth pulled, they can scare her. They can use a death from a heroin overdose to get Suzy to advocate more money for addiction and overdose treatments. I wouldn't hesitate too much to say we're being played by the CDC, as part of the general thing we see in every Fed.gov agency, loosely translated as "Don't cut us! We're valuable!"

That entire paragraph seems to describe byproducts of the WoD, so completely tossing our WoD and all its infrastructure would profoundly change all of it. But like I said yesterday, that's just not gonna happen. Far too many cronies and Deep State swamp creatures make a living off the WoD. They will protect that turf and I don't see much chance that the WoD goes away. If the country economically collapses and has to reset, maybe it will be too low priority to worry about the WoD. For a while.

Another way of visualizing what all the noise is about, again from the CDC. Between 2006 and 2014, deaths from "opioid analgesics" went from 4 to 6 people per 100,000. That's .0006 %. Are we making mountains out of statistical molehills?

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Retired radio engineer, follower of Christ, RF designer, mentor. Radio ham, home shop machinist, lapidary, silversmith, roadie cyclist, learning to be a rifleman, and home defender, - a guy with too many interests to keep track of.

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